PERFECT Anime/Toon Shading in Blender 4.0!

if we want to make a 3D model look like an anime or cartoon we can easily put a special tune Shader on it and it might look okay but as soon as the lighting changes we end up with some ugly Shadows most 3D models are made with standard topology but this style of topology just won't work for a tune shaded model with tun shading we have to Define exactly where we want the Shadows to be so that from any angle the Shadows are always perfect I'm going to show you the best way I found of turning a standard 3D model into a ton shaded model without having to completely redo your topology in 3D software each face has a normal and this is usually perpendicular to the face this normal direction will determine if that face will be lit or unlit so if face is pointing towards a light source then it will be lit and as soon as it goes past a certain threshold it will be in Shadow for a character it will have hundreds or even thousands of faces and they're all pointing in slightly different directions which is why we end up with ugly shading what we need to do is break the face up into smaller shading zones so that each of these zones will be pointing in the same direction so then when we rotate our lights each of these sections will get lit and and unlit at the same time resulting in clean shading to Define these zones you can use these ones that I've created or if you want you can Google anime shading and you'll find other examples but this is all down to whatever style you want if you want even just take a screenshot of your character and then bring it into Photoshop or whatever software and draw your shadows making sure to plan for as many different angles as you need the basic method that I'll show you results in Shadows that snap but if we want to add smoother transitions you need to plan for these by adding extra transition areas I'll come back to this later but for now now we'll stick with the snappy Shadows we can add smoothing later but just know the planning for the smooth transitions now will make them a lot smoother when we start editing the model in blender the first thing we need is a light so we can just add in a sun and change the intensity to five now just rotate the sun on the x-axis so that you can see some Shadows on your model I'm going to add key frames for the sun rotation so that on frame zero it has a zed rotation of zero and on frame 360 it has a zed rotation of 360 you'll probably need to change the start and end range for the timeline so that we can see all of the frames we'll be constantly rotating the sun to check the normals so by having it animated we can easily click on the timeline to check our shading instead of having to rotate the sun manually split the timeline window in half and add the graph editor and select both of the key frames and press V and change the key frame type to Vector this will just make sure that we have linear rotation with no easing now we can create a basic tune Shader create a new material and in the Shader editor you can delete the principal Shader and add a diffus Shader all we need is a surface that responds to light so we don't need any of the advanced controls that the principal Shader gives us now we can add the Shader to RGB node which is how most blender NPR shaders are made it converts the Shader into color information which we can then manipulate to create those sharp Shadows we can add a color ramp node and change it to constant now we can select the white point and move it over and so we see some nice Shadows you can move this up or down and it will change how much of your model would be in Shadow you can change the colors for both the black and white inputs and this will give you a fairly basic tune Shader but but I'm going to plug this color ramp into the factor of a mixed color node so that I can use a texture and then multiply it by a shadow color now we can start defining our shadow zones duplicate your model with shift d and move it off to the side we'll be using this as a reference to see where the shadow should be according to the original topology now we can switch to The annotation tool on the left side change the placement from 3D cursor to surface to allow us to draw on the model in The annotation menu where it says note you can change the color and thickness but make sure to click lock frame you can use The annotation tool for planning out animations but by locking the frame we can draw and it won't change when we move forward on the timeline if you want to erase any of the lines you can press control and this will change to the Eraser and you can scroll the middle Mouse wheel to change the size of this now we can just start drawing on the model so with our light directly from the front on frame zero you can start drawing where you want your shadows to be this will change depending on the model so take your time and plan it using the original topology and the examples as a guide now we can go to frame 30 at this point the light will be rotated 30° on the Zed axis you can see where the original shading is but now just draw in where you want your new Shadows to be this doesn't have to be precise just roughly sketch in where you want the lines to be you want to keep the shading fairly similar to the original because changing it too much will look unnatural now go forward to frame 60 at this point you'll probably want to define the triangle under the eye which is very common in anime shading we're drawing the shadows in 30° increments and in the end this will give us a fairly nice result but if you want more Zone just go in smaller increments and draw in more sections it'll take longer but it'll give you smoother transitions between the different zones now lastly go to frame 90 and draw where you want your shadows to be usually half of the model will be perfectly in Shadow but again this depends on the style you're going for the most important thing is that each of our zones are roughly facing in the same direction so make sure that your zones aren't too big or the shading won't look right just keep in mind where the planes of the face are and along with the original topology and the shading examples you should be able to place your zones correctly now all we have to do is start adjusting our topology to follow these lines in edit mode pressing G twice will allow you to slide vertices instead of just moving them sliding will keep your Textures in place whereas moving will drag the textures so find the vertices that are closest to the guides and then just slide them into place you'll probably need to use the knife tool K to cut diagonal lines between vertices or you can select some vertices and press J and this will try and connect the vertices while cutting the faces and creating the edges at the same time now it's just a matter of repeating the same step for the whole model it might take a while but once you're done your model should look a little something like this we've created our zones but for the next step we need to be able to select these zones and you could select them manually but there's an easier way select all of the edges around one of the zones I'll do the triangle below the ey now we can press contr e and Mark these as sharp edges which will turn them blue in regular use sharp edges will create a sharp angle which will affect the shading but for our purposes we'll be using these as selection guides go around and select the edges for all of your zones marking them all as sharp edges this is also a good way of seeing the flow of your shading zones so you can adjust them if you need to with all of these created change to face selection mode and now we can hover over any of these zones and press L and this will activate linked selection mode now down in the bottom left we can change the type of this from seam to Sharp and it will only select the faces within our sharp zones if it selects more than you wanted just go around and double check that you have sharp edges everywhere you need them you should be able to go through every Zone and select them all separately with linked selection now we can start editing the normals for each of these zones to see what we're doing a bit clearer we can go to solid view so that we can see the normals being changed before editing the normals we just need to go to the object data Tab and under the normal section enable auto smooth and turn it all the way up to 180 this will just make sure the blender doesn't automatically detect sharp edges on our model because that will mess up our selections blender has some basic basic normal editing Tools in edit mode which you can find under the mesh section at the top or you can press alt n and the menu will pop up the two we're going to be using are copy vector and paste Vector this is going to be very simple all you need to do is select a face roughly in the middle of your shading Zone then copy the vector for this face then press L while hovering over this same section to select it and we can paste the vector if you go back to object mode you should see the area looks a lot flatter now but to show you what it's done we can select the area and isolate it with shift H if we enable the custom normals overlay this will show us that all of the normals are now facing the same direction you can change the size of the direction lines if they're too long and if you toggle on and off auto smooth you can see the difference it makes so now for the purposes of shading this whole area will be treated as if it was flat we can now press alt H to bring back the rest of the model and now we can repeat the same process of copying and pasting vectors for all of the other sections you can turn these two options into Quick favorites by right clicking on them and then by pressing Q we can open open up a custom menu if you want you can go and download my free add-on that just turns these steps into a single button press and it will save you from having to go in and out of menus constantly if you want some more advanced normal editing tools check out the free abnormal add-on this has been used by NPR artists for years and it gives you way more features than mine editing the normals shouldn't take too long because we have all the zones already planned out and marked so it's just a matter of selecting them and copying and pasting the normals your model should look pretty different now it'll look very flat but that's exactly what we want now we can switch back over to rendered view to start tweaking things I found the best way of troubleshooting normals is to rotate your sun in increments so start off at 45° then down to 30 and 20 making sure that the shaded areas look correct every time you rotate your sun if any areas don't look right we can fix them by rotating the normals for that section this is why we animated the sun earlier to save us from having to rotate it each time as we adjust the normals so under the normals menu we can choose rotate vector and this will allow us to rotate the normals you'll be using this a lot lot so make it a quick favorite or you can create a custom keyboard shortcut for it this is another cool feature that I don't see a lot of people using but you can right click on most buttons and assign a shortcut for it so for rotate normals I'm going to make it alt or this rotate Vector tool Works similarly to the regular rotate so we can press X Y or Zed to only rotate on one axis select the section you want to rotate and rotate the vectors on just the Y AIS slowly move your mouse up and down and eventually the section should change I found that usually there's a short side if you have to move it in One Direction too much you're probably rotating it the wrong way so go in the opposite direction and usually it'll be easier so now rotate your sun again and check to see if the shading looks correct I usually do the full 360 for the first pass so start at zero then 45 90 135 180 and so on this will just make sure that we have each section roughly facing the right direction now we can change the 30° increments at certain points you'll see areas that should be in Shadow or parts that should be lit and it's just a matter of rotating the normals for each section until they look correct at the beginning rotating on the y- AIS usually does most of the work but eventually you might have to play around with rotating on the X or Zed Axis or in some cases not specifying an axis and just rotating slowly until you get the result you want this is the most timec consuming part because we want to make sure that the shading looks good from every angle so you might have to go as low as 5° increments for your sun but once you do that then you know that your model will look perfect from any angle under any lighting conditions as I mentioned earlier this is the snappy method of editing normals and I think it looks pretty good but if you want to get smoother transitions we'll need to do a bit of work using the data transfer modifier in order to get the Shadows to move smoothly across the model will need the normals to gradually rotate from one section to the next you could do this manually by rotating individual vertex normals but that's very timec consuming so I've come up with an easier way the way this method works is that we create a duplicate of our mesh with the normals rotated slightly then we can copy the normals from this rotated mesh but instead of copying them fully we can use a Vertex group and copy them based on a gradient meaning the normals at the edge of the section will be rotated more and then gradually they'll rotate back to the original normal value giving us a nice gradient for our normals so now back in blender we can duplicate our main head mesh with shift d and move it off to the side this will be our reference head so that we don't make any changes to our main model now on the main mesh add a data transfer modifier what we need to do is assign the object we want to copy from in this case our reference head and click generate data layers we need to generate the data so that the modifier knows what information it needs to copy now we can go down to face Corner data select custom normals and change the mapping to topology the mesh that we're copying from has the exact same topology so that's why we can use this mapping type other methods of getting anime normals will sometimes use spheres or cylinders that are placed over the head and then you can copy their normals which means your head will be lit as if it was a sphere or cylinder this method could be good for background characters because it's much quicker and easier than custom normals and in most cases is it looks pretty good anyway our main model hasn't changed because we haven't made any changes to the reference mesh one thing we need to do with the reference mesh is separate all of the sharp edges we need to do this because later we'll be weight painting and without separating we can't get sharp edges between the sections so select any sharp edge and then press shift G to select similar edges and choose sharpness now with all of these edges selected we can press V to rip all of these edges so now our sections are no longer connected meaning we can we pain correctly we need to duplicate our reference head and again move it to the side now in edit mode select everything and rotate the normals roughly -5 degrees on the y- AIS you can type in minus5 if you want this will be the rotated version of our head now we can add a data transfer modifier to the reference head and copy the normals from the rotated head on the reference head create a new vertex group and call it normals now assign this to the vertex group field of the data transfer modifier what we need to do is go to a frame where a shadow appears on the rotated mesh but doesn't appear on the reference mesh because we've rotated the normals the left mesh will be in Shadow 15° before the reference mesh so in way paint mode you can then enable face selection in the top left corner and then if you hover over any sections you can press L to select them now we can start drawing a gradient in that section the direction of this gradient will determine what way your shadows will move so pay attention to which direction you're drawing for this first section I want it to move across the face so I'll be painting from left to right on the left side of the section we want the value to be one and on the right side we want the value to be zero so paint the left side of the section red and then we can come back with the blur brush and smooth out the transition if you did this correctly you should start seeing the shadow on the main mesh change what we can then do is scrub forward and back along the timeline and we can see how the shadow is moving within that section if certain parts don't look good we can adjust the weights by painting with a weight of either zero or one and adjusting the strength to 0.1 so that we're only making Minor Adjustments to the weight weights so slowly paint over certain areas of the mesh going back and forth adding a small bit subtracting a small bit if you press control while painting it will invert the brush so you can easily add in some tract without having to change it manually you can also then go back to the blur brush to hopefully smooth out any areas and as I said at the beginning the shadow transitions won't look perfect unless your topology allows for it so if you want your shadows to move perfectly from section to section you'll need to have loops of vertices in the direction that you want your shadows to flow so once the first setion is done move on to the next one find a frame where the Shadow shows up on the rotated mesh but not on the reference mesh hover over the area and press L making sure that you're only selecting the area you want to paint then just pain in a gradient in the direction that you want your Shadow to show up then go back and forth adding and subtracting small amounts and blurring until you get smooth Shadows once that section is done move on to the next one and repeat the same process when you're finished the weight painting should look something like this and as we rotate our light we can see that the gradients we painted caused the shadow to move across the face pretty smoothly the great thing about this method is that you can continue to play around with the weight painting until you're happy it's much easier to play with the weight painting than having to go and manually rotate individual vertex nobl if you're happy with your weights and your Shadow transitions you can apply all of the modifiers on the main mesh and then you can start manually adjusting things if you really need to but I think this method does most of the hardwork for you at this point the model looks great but the one big downside that you haven't seen yet is that if we try to add anim at the face the normals will break this is expected behavior when we move vertices blender recalculates the normals so it can update the light incorrectly but we don't want this so we can fix it using the data transfer modifier again we want to copy the normals from a static version of the head so then when we animate the main mesh it will be taking the normals from the static version resulting in nice Shadows so we can duplicate our finished model and this will be our static version then on our main mesh add the data transfer modifier and copy the normals from from the static head now we can start animating the face and the normals will stay nice and sharp the main thing to understand here is that we're copying the normals from the other head so if we rotate the main head you also have to rotate the static head so you would have to parent the static mesh to your rig so that it follows the head rotation then when you rotate the head bone both heads will rotate and the lighting will update correctly so the custom normals for the face are finished but if you want to take your tune models one step further here's a couple of bonus tips if you want to have nice shading for your character's body you can go through and Define custom normals like we did for the face but sometimes all you need to do is copy the normals from other objects you could place some spheres or cylinders over the different parts of your mesh and copy the normals from these shapes using the data transfer modifier and you can then use vertex groups to Define where these new normals will be affecting if parts of your model still don't look right you can always add multiple data transfer modifiers to fix each part if you want certain parts of your model to always stay in Shadow maybe the neck or ears you could select these areas then go into vertex paint mode mode and fill these areas with black by pressing CR X then back in the Shader editor you can use the color attribute node and we can mix this into the color ramp so that these areas will always be in Shadow normal editing for anime and Tune characters is one of those painful processes that nobody likes but hopefully this more procedural method of editing normals will make the process more simple it's a defined set of rules and guidelines and if you follow them you should end up with some nice tun shading anyway I hope you enjoyed and thanks for watching

Channel: Vertex Arcade

Views: 154,555

Keywords: blender, blender 4.0, tutorial, custom normals, blender normals, blender normal editing, blender anime, anime shading, blender cartoon, nami, one piece, guilty gear, guilty gear shading, blender lesson, blender toon shader, blender npr, non photoreal rendering

Id: SM8ukvOFgKs

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023